Sleep well, Darling

A few weeks ago I observed how American TV ads for proprietary drugs have to list possible side-effects, out loud, so that when you see the smiling chap who was impotent until he acquired Stiphigel, or whatever, you hear about the headaches, heart murmurs, runny nose, etc that might ruin any pleasure the prescription brings. Another plugs sleeping tablets, adding: "Call your doctor right away if you walk, drive, or engage in other actions while asleep."

So at last we have an explanation for Alistair Darling. He's fast asleep. He's running the economy but he doesn't know it. Some day someone will snap their fingers and he'll wake up, bewildered. "What have I done? Did I make a fool of myself?" he will ask anxiously. "Well, you did seem to change your mind an awful lot," friends will tell him. "And you stole quite a few Tory ideas ..."

"Did I?" he groans. "But I thought that was a dream."

There was an air of somnambulism at Treasury questions yesterday. One topic was rising energy prices. MPs asked short and snappy questions. Mr Darling, however, would not shut up. As if in his pyjamas, he rambled on, roving round the subject, bumping into tricky problems, somehow staying asleep. His words came, give or take a dozen, to 1,545. They say God looks after sleepwalkers, guiding them away from potholes, cars and so forth. Certainly some greater force is looking after Alistair Darling, gently steering him away from saying anything meaningful at all.

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, tried to find out whether the help for former 10p income tax payers would be backdated. The chief secretary, Yvette Cooper, had said that she couldn't confirm it would be. But Frank Field, leader of the backbench rebels, had said the opposite. He'd had a meeting with Gordon Brown, and the prime minister had personally promised that the whole package would be backdated to April 1. "So who speaks for the government?" Mr Osborne asked.

Mr Darling used 450 words to avoid the question. He discussed Tory policy changes. He said something would be done for pensioners. "I also said in relation to all the other people who are affected that this is something that I want to look at, and I will come back to the house in the pre-budget report ..." We are all familiar with dream words which seem coherent while we sleep, yet, when we wake up, turn out to be embarrassing nonsense.

Doctors often warn it can be dangerous to wake a sleepwalker suddenly, but that didn't stop Mr Osborne from trying. "Stop all this waffle ... will the package be backdated, yes or no?" he barked.

For a moment we feared Mr Darling might snap out of his sleep. But he didn't. Unlike the chap in the US ad, he won't even call his spin doctor right away.

Later, the industry secretary, John Hutton, said that in spite of the Grangemouth strike there was "plenty of fuel". So it's time to start panic buying!